Table of Contents
If you’ve ever enjoyed coffee, tomatoes, corn, bananas, mangoes, nuts, chocolate, tequila, or mezcal, you may have bats to thank.
While bats are often the object of fear and scorn – they are an integral part of Halloween decor and haunted house imagery, and are often depicted as harbingers of doom – their presence is often a sign of a thriving ecosystem. Some of our favorite foods and drinks would be much less plentiful, or even non-existent, without them.
Bats play some important roles the roles in human food systems. Some serve as natural pest control by feeding on insects that can destroy crops like corn and pecans. Others pollinate species like bananas, coconuts, avocados and agave, a role many associate with bees and butterflies. And some fruit bats help maintain populations of wild plants through seed dispersal – think mangoes, cashews, figs and almonds.
Despite all the ways bats help ecosystems thrive, “they’re often forgotten” in conversations about conservation and in people’s estimates of what it takes to maintain sustainable food systems, Kristen Lear said. , who works at Bat Conservation International. Whether it’s because we simply don’t notice bats (as nocturnal animals, they’re certainly not easy to observe) or because we tend to associate them with dark and scary things, bats -mice are rarely defended. But as threats from habitat destruction, disease and climate change grow, it’s time for that to change.
No bats, no tequila
Most of the time when you order a margarita, you probably don’t think about bats — but maybe you should. Tequila is made from agave, and agave plants have long relied on bats for pollination and seed dispersal.
The Mexican long-nosed bat, which has co-evolved with agave for millions of years, is a small, fluffy gray-brown creature that uses its 3-inch-long tongue to suck nectar from agave flowers which flower at night. This migratory species travels from west Texas and southwestern New Mexico to Mexico each year, matching the flowering times of flowering agaves and cacti.
But as demand for tequila and mezcal – another agave-based spirit – increases, the plant is increasingly harvested at scales that endanger these migratory bats. After being enjoyed in Mexico for hundreds of years, agave-based spirits are becoming increasingly popular increasingly popular abroadand nowhere are they more sought after than in the United States, where approximately 80% of the world’s tequila is sold.
“Agave spirits from Mexico are very trendy right now. This trend probably started 10 years ago, but over the last four or five years it has been intense,” said Diana Pinzón, a forestry engineer who works with small mezcal producers. “It’s a big problem for Mexico’s endemic agaves, as well as bats and all the biodiversity around the ecosystems where agaves grow.”
America’s thirst for agave-based spirits and the money that can be made selling them is pushing producers to harvest on a scale and in a way that is unsustainable in the long term, according to Pinzón. In many places, agave plants are cut down before they have time to flower, leaving bats that rely on the flowers’ nectar with one less food source.
Growers can grow new agaves by working with “baby” shoots sent out by the parent plants, but without the cross-pollination of bats, the new plants are all clones and lose their genetic diversity over time. Pinzón fears this will make plants less resilient to climate threats and extreme weather.
“These two species have evolved together over the last 10 years. If you lose one, you lose the other,” she said.
Pinzón creates a small brand called Zinacantan Mezcal with a fourth generation agave grower who leaves 20% of the crop in the field to bats and believes that limiting the amount of agave alcohol production is the only way forward for any legitimate claim to sustainability.
“The demand is like that of cars in the city. If you build a new highway (to regulate traffic), more cars will end up on the road,” she said. “So (agave) projects need to set limits and say, ‘OK, we can produce this amount (of spirits) every year and no more.’ We must recognize and take action to mitigate our ecological impact.
Insect eaters
Troy Swift was agriculture pecans in Texas since 1998, but he hadn’t thought about building bat houses near his orchards until recently. He was first inspired when Merlin Tuttle, a legendary bat defender, visited his farm and suggested it. “He said, ‘Troy, with the biodiversity you have here, you might really consider using bats as part of your pest control program,'” Swift recalls.
It wasn’t long before Swift began building his own bat houses. In six months, bats settled there. He now has 17 bat houses on his property and works with Tuttle’s organization to quantify the impact of bats on his crops. Together, they used echolocation technology and guano (bat dropping) DNA sampling to learn that there are at least seven species of bats living on Swift’s farm. They also found that in six weeks, the bats had eaten more than 100 species of insects.
They are still trying to gather enough data to prove whether or not bats help control the specific pests that eat pecans, but have discovered that bats eat mosquitoes, flies and pests that bother livestock is already enough to convince Swift that bats have a role to play on farms.
“What we’re trying to do is harness the use of bats throughout agriculture and teach farmers that these bats really are your friends,” Swift said.
Other studies have already concluded that bats provide free pest control services to farmers, whether they know it or not. Bats save more than $1 billion a year in crop damage and pesticide use in the U.S. corn industry, and more than $3 billion a year in overall agricultural production, according to Jade Florence, a biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, who has worked on bat conservation efforts.
According to Lear of Bat Conservation International, simply having bats nearby, even when they’re not feeding, helps control pests. “The mere presence of bats in agricultural fields can actually suppress the activity of these insects,” she said.
How to help endangered bats
For all the good they bring to food systems, bats face many threats. “Many species around the world, including here in the United States, are experiencing some sort of habitat loss, whether it is disruption of their roosting sites in caves, mines, or trees, or loss of foraging habitat – loss of healthy forests or agricultural areas. insect populations,” Lear said. Other threats include extreme weather caused by the climate crisis and diseases like white nose syndromea fungal disease that has decimated bat populations in North America.
So what can be done? Lear worked on a project with 60 partners in the United States and Mexico to plant 115,000 agave plants in the migratory path of Mexican long-nosed bats. Its organization recommended explore nature responsibly (for example, respect the closure of caves so as not to expose bat populations to new pathogens), protect old trees that can serve as roosts for bats, keep cats indoors where they cannot harm bats and provide a source of water in arid environments.
People who want to go further can build Or buy a bat shelter and plant a bat-friendly garden with night-blooming native flowers to attract nocturnal insects that bats can feed on. (Besides having a positive ecological benefit, “it’s just fun” to have bats, said Swift, who loves watching them emerge at dusk to hunt insects.)
But Lear said you can also help by doing something even simpler: talking about bats and why we need them. “The more people do this to their friends and family, the more it will ingrain itself in their brains,” she said. “Over time, this will help build public support for bat conservation. »